


Until I am whole

by dimtraces



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Coda for Episode 5.01: Revival, Gen, Loss of Limbs, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 03:02:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14369493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: They barely escaped the disastrous pirate alliance. Now, they’re drifting and helpless in a slowly freezing escape pod, and Savage can’t fall asleep. The arm won’t let him.





	Until I am whole

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : All the usual Savage stuff, so past fratricide, nonconsensual body modification, brainwashing and self-blame. Amputation. Also, body horror. If descriptions of rats eating someone's body squick you out then you probably won't enjoy this.

It hurts. That’s wrong, fundamentally: the arm shouldn’t throb and seize and bubble still, because it’s gone now, dismembered, a piece of trash dropped in panic after Kenobi showed up and Maul’s plan went to hell. It shouldn’t hurt, but it shoots its hungry darts through the bones that aren’t anymore and into the shoulder that is still attached to the meat that contains Savage; the meat that _is_ Savage and that is all he’ll ever know.

The Mother turned him into a god unmarred by the scars of his old life or its affections, a creature of devotion tall and muscled and bright— _he felt their eyes on him, lying half-bare on the table down below the witches, and he feels them still_ —She turned him into the image of perfection and he paid with his life. His meat, softly twisted in the Mother’s hand, obedient and unscarred and unhim. Unhinged, a door torn houseless and of no use anymore to the brothers it’s meant to protect. Open to any witch who’ll wander in. To any will. Free for the taking, and only fit to burn. It burns.

It shouldn’t hurt, the arm, but it does. Everything hurts. The Mother’s perfection was not enough. He was not enough. He’s never been. The lightsaber still gnaws on him, or a ghost of it does, a shard of Kenobi that will forever be close. A taste of Maul’s long life, and Savage would give him safety forever if he could. A taste is too much already for him. Maul should have had better, as a child and a man and as the elder he will never become.

He will never grow old.

He won’t, and all the promises are worthless: Savage would give him safety if he could. He can’t. There will never be any better than this, for either of them.

Soon, they are going to die.

Next to the stump defeated and bathed in the glow of evil magic, and slightly upwards, Savage’s burning eyes are slipping shut in exhaustion and chill. The fight and the flight and its nerves are turning to shakes, or maybe that’s the cold. It’s probably the cold. The cold is in everything now.

Leaning against the opposite wall is the shivering breathing corpse of Savage’s brother, too far away to feel or console. A corpse: they were both alive before they fled, but now the end is close enough to make no difference. They are trapped in a rudderless escape capsule. They are freezing. They are dead. It won’t be long now. Maul, rotting, just like the first brother Savage failed— _the first brother Savage killed_ —and there is nothing to be done. No help. All his love is useless. It hurts.

Maul will be dead in days at most. Savage, too, but that’s just the way it goes. He counts along to the beats of throbbing pain.

//

It hurts. The world has narrowed. The only thing that is now is the frostening shelter drifting through dark waiting for the end, and inside, an arm that lies somewhere deep below the ground. Savage’s hurt arm, pulsing sharp and regular and a handhold will not let him slip. Will not let him _sleep_.

The pain in the left arm that is gone is all there is.

It chants over the cold and the distance and the impossibility of survival. The hunger and the dry, the faint pressure behind his restless eyelids, the old bad-healed twinges in his spine that were not wiped away in the perfection and destruction of his body, Maul’s head lolling slowly down and the torn fingernail… all the world numbs with chill, but the pain in the arm remains. It’s the only part of him that’s not freezing to death now, after all. Why should it. It’s not even here.

It is the only real thing, that’s how sharp it is. It builds a gleaming house of _there_ and he climbs gratefully in. It is him now. He is pain. He is gone.

//

It hurts, when he wakes up and his corpse-brother’s eyes watch him calm and bright in the freezing gloom. It’s red silent agony, worse than he’s ever felt; it’s cooked flesh like the bearded master’s electricity but more, and in his desperation to be free, to tear it like a rancor would its trapped leg, Savage imagines the arm left down there and behind, slowly consumed by rats. Slowly disappeared. Without the arm, there will be no place for pain to latch onto, and he can drift away.

He dreams, open-eyed. He imagines rats nosing at their discovery and wriggling and singing happy of their future meal. They are small-feathered and gnarled and ill, just like the filth he kept from out his larder a life ago. They are hungry. Quickly, their snouts are gone. Their naked heads disappear. Then, a howling protest: there is no blood to spurt and slake their thirst. Savage winces with sympathy. He was only down there for the fight and there was no time to pay attention, but he saw no water. He imagines they must be thirsty. He is thirsty.

Clever and undeterred, they dig and climb their way into the meat, until the arm bulges and teems with life, yellow skin stretched breaking-thin, and what just used to be unrecognizable as Savage doesn’t even look like a limb anymore.

A breath, and the swollen lumps split, spouting pale small rats onto the ground. Carefully, Savage watches.

The rats return. They tear into the muscle. They slurp and fight over tendons, and he cheers them. There will never be any better for him or his brother now they both are dead, and he must take the small triumphs he finds. Besides, the rats are the very first to prosper of this body. Quickly, small groves of teeth all over the growing pale bone, biting hard in their eagerness for the lovely marrow.

Tiny lives moving in a frenzy of survival, and soon, the arm is no more.

It does not help.

They are climbing onto the shoulder now, betraying Savage; they are scrambling towards the belly and within blinks they are deep into the soft of him. Numb to their teeth and the tingling of it, he is too tired to move. He is too cold. He watches them. They have a fondness for the liver, and barely, he keeps from dripping vomit onto the breastplate, where it would freeze stiff.

Curious eyes meet his while he heaves and swallows. A brow-ridge quirks.

Savage bites his tongue. He has no tongue. It was devoured long ago. Still, Savage will not go whining to the brother who was cut in half; who met the eager rats, and lived amongst them. Who ate them back.

It’s nothing, anyway. They’re _both_ dying. Why should he need assurance, when his brother is silent? Savage only scared himself with his mind, and it’s only barely more than a scratch anyway, the wound, even if it hurts. It’s nothing like the pain Maul was dealt. Talking would be a waste of words he does not have, drifting out and into himself. Of breath, precious and cold. It would be a waste.

Out here far from Dathomir, people probably lose their arms all the time.

 _(A curious thing: if Savage had begged for comfort, he would have received it. Fumbling care, perhaps, but Maul is miserable with blame and quiet and inescapable death, and he would have liked something to occupy his hands._ _Something to say, though he does not recognize his need.)_

//

It hurts. He cannot sleep anymore. His eyes won’t open. The left hand is a witch now, white-burnt needling pain. The rats have stripped him down to the bones of their truth and the cold has taken the rest, and now Savage can see: the left hand.

That hand.

Before Kenobi cut it, it was the hand that held up Feral; the hand that broke the neck of the child he sold himself to save. The hand, darting out like the great sky-mother from out her nest to snare the child who walks away from home. The killing hand, untrembling with the beauty of her word, while somewhere deep inside the obedient meat he curled and sobbed his violation, his brother’s loss, or at least in the here and the cold he likes to believe he did. It is not clear why it should be better, to be capable of feeling the _wrong_ of it wrapped inside the soft words of Her control. It shouldn’t be better, when the wrong did nothing to stop itself. It just is.

The left hand: the first part he saw of the meat of Her desires, the god creature that is him now. Its first act, a herald of the monster he was to become.

The hand is gone now, and it hurts. The hurt feels good.

It was the hand that held up Feral.

Now, it’s gone. It’s just a stump leaking magic and pain. It does not even bleed. It will not even kill him. No need for that, anyway: he is dead. There is no way to escape the pod, and the cold will do just as well as a bleedout. The hand, instead, chains him close, a point of real and burning in the numb, and it will not kill him. It will not let him sleep.

It was the hand that held up Feral, but next to it, and slightly upwards: the eyes that looked on strange and unkind. The eyes that watched Feral die. It was the ears that heard Feral’s last words and the mouth that mocked him and the legs that didn’t cave; it was the brain that thought in unison with Her and in compliance, “Kill him.” It was the tears uncried and the bowels holding fast.

All did their part. There is nothing in this body that wasn’t Hers.

It was the hand that held up Feral that is gone now, but this body is full of accomplices. They are no less murderers. They are all him. He is them. He will never be clean.

 

//

 

It hurts. Weeks have gone since the rescue, and in the arm’s stead, the Mandalorians have screwed a prosthetic that does not quite feel, the searching hand in the black-needle undergrowth wrapped thick in leather. Savage did not ask for the new arm: like the body, it is another’s will and thoughts grafted onto what is left of him, and he does not think of it often.

Presently, it’s raised behind Maul’s head. A knife is hurtling towards it.

It’s preparing to stop the knife.

It’s raised in protection, and it is new. Savage’s eyes widen. It is new. The left arm has only been him for a few weeks, and so… it was not there when he killed Feral. It bears no guilt. The arm is not the Mother’s, it’s scrap metal magicless and a blight on the meat Her white warm hands twisted into a god. It did not kill Feral. If there is any fleck of loyalty, of honor, left in Savage—it lives in the space where there used to be the arm that Kenobi cut.

_(Later, he will scratch this triumph into the arm, patterns and swirls that tell of the part of him that did not kill a brother. The writing will be illegible: a script of his own devising, mangled by the unpracticed murderous right hand. Untouched by perfection. It will be the favorite part of him.)_

The knife stops.

**Author's Note:**

> Savage's left-handed! I didn't know that until I wondered whether the hand Savage loses is the hand that killed Feral so I could rehash how traumatic Monster was in yet another fic.
> 
> Title from the Mountain Goats song.
> 
> This is mostly a style experiment to be honest. I spent the last few weeks writing a term paper which meant I had no time or brain capacity for plots and so on, but I needed something to burn off my feelings, and so. Here you go. Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for reading!


End file.
